Listening to Infrastructure: Acoustic Emission Monitoring of Geotechnical Limit States

Introduction

Listening to Infrastructure: Acoustic Emission Monitoring of Geotechnical Limit States

by

Professor Neil Dixon and Dr Alister Smith

of

Loughborough University

Tuesday 3rd March at 18:00 hours

Institution of Civil Engineers, One Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA

This event is free to attend, advance booking is not required. Tea & coffee will be available from 17:30.

The event will be webcast live and can be viewed via this link. An event password is needed to join the event, please input ‘BGA1’.

A flyer can be downloaded here.

Synopsis

There is an urgent need for improved and affordable approaches for health monitoring of geotechnical infrastructure systems to facilitate asset management (e.g. slopes, foundations, dams and buried pipes). A proportion of energy dissipated during deformation of soil, soil-structural interactions and seepage processes is converted to heat and sound. The high-frequency (>10kHz) component of this sound energy is called acoustic emission (AE).

It has been established that detected AE rates are proportional to rates of soil deformation and can be used to provide early information on both serviceability and ultimate limit states.

AE instrumentation is now available for continuous and real-time geotechnical monitoring. This presentation will introduce AE generation mechanisms and monitoring approaches in geotechnical engineering and describe the development and use of AE sensors for landslide early warning. It will also detail on-going research to deliver AE monitoring solutions for a range of applications (e.g. buried pipelines and earth dams).

Speaker biographies

Professor Neil Dixon has over 35 years of experience in geotechnical engineering research and practice. He has studied slope failure mechanisms, in situ measurement of soil and waste properties, slope stability assessment, instrumentation development, slope process modelling, landfill barrier design and climate change impacts.

Dr Alister Smith is a Lecturer in Civil Engineering and is currently an EPSRC Fellow leading Listening to Infrastructure research, which is developing AE sensing technologies for a range of geotechnical domains.

Dixon and Smith co-invented the Slope ALARMS and Community Slope SAFE acoustic emission landslide early warning approaches and are members of the EPSRC ACHILLES Programme grant consortia investigating impacts of climate change on earthworks. They have received numerous prizes for publications and impact

Drinks sponsor

Please join us afterwards for drinks sponsored by RST Instruments